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Notes from the Home - February 22, 2013

Maria can be crotchety. And with her acid
tongue and sense of humor, the more crotchety she gets, the more fun she is to
be around. She spices her complaints with well-placed hells and damns, which
she delivers with added emphasis, as if to make sure no one mistakes them for
hecks and darns. The complainers at Covenant Woods, for the most part, are a
humorless group. When things aren’t to their liking, they blame it on the staff
and management’s astounding stupidity. Maria complains about stupidity too, but
she does so with the realization that stupidity is the human condition, and all
of us are heir to it. And as she complains, she smiles.

Saturday, as I was on my way to dinner, I
met Maria headed the other way.

“Going to breakfast?” she asked.

Not a sound came from my mouth, but, “Oh my
God, Maria, you’ve gone senile,” was written all over my face.

“They’re serving breakfast for dinner
tonight,” she said.

That cleared up things. Every now and then
on a Saturday, scrambled eggs are the only dinner entree. Sandwiches and salads
are available, but for those looking for a meal, the choice is scrambled eggs
or scramble eggs.

“There’s going to be a change of management
here on Tuesday,” she said, after making it clear she that scrambled eggs
wasn’t her choice. “I’m telling you this because I know I can trust you not to
say anything. But there’s going to be new management here. And remember, don’t
say a word.”

“What new management?” Sally asked,
appearing in the doorway of the activity room.

Until that moment, I was sure Maria was
engaged in nothing more than a little heads-are-going-to-roll joking. But the
look on her face when she saw Sally and realized she’d heard some of our conversation
said, “Me and my big mouth.” Maria quickly concocted a story about a new
manager at a local store, and we all went our separate ways.

The Town Hall meeting was Tuesday, and the
announced change was in procedure not management. At some unspecified date, the
residents will stop marking their own menu cards. To make the dining experience
more restaurant-like, menus will be placed on the tables, and the servers will
ask the residents for their order. Pity the poor servers. Often, as soon as the
server picks up the menu card the resident remembers ordering that which he did
not. In those cases, the menu card is the server’s only defense when the
resident berates her for incompetence and not paying attention.

Early in the New Year, Richie returned from
Rhode Island, where he’d spent the holidays visiting his son. A shoulder bag
he’d carried on the plane during the return flight stayed for a while in
Atlanta. Richie remembered having it with him as he waited at the airport for
the Groome van to pick him up and cart him back to Columbus. But the bag was
nowhere to be found when the van pulled up to Covenant Woods.

Richie got the number for the airport
lost-and-found from the van driver. The number is for a recording, which tells
callers the airport lost-and-found does not process claims over the phone and
refers them to a website. Surprisingly, for a man a year or two younger than I
and who used to work on submarines, Richie is computer illiterate.

So, he came over, we got on the website, and
I typed in the information. There wasn’t much: a black shoulder bag with no ID
tags, and a pair of boots, some toiletries and a couple prescriptions inside
it. His chances of ever seeing it again were slim, I thought, and none after a
week went by and he hadn’t heard anything. But last week, six weeks after the
bag was lost, Richie got a call from the lost-and-found. His bag had been
located and would be shipped to him. The package arrived yesterday. The easiest
good deed I’ve ever performed.

Al dropped in the other day. He looked at
all the candy that has accumulated on the TV tray. Except for the two boxes of
Girl Scout cookies that I bought the other day, all the goodies were given to
me, most of them by Al. His prescription for good health: Three cups of black
coffee a day, two glasses of red wine and all the chocolate you can.

He looked at the table, then at me. He
looked at the table again. Then, turning back toward me, he glanced at my
midsection.

“You ought to do something about this,” he
said, patting his stomach with his hands. “You’re getting big around here. You
better stop eating so much.”

“You just said I should eat more chocolate.”

“You should. They’re finding that chocolate
is good for you.”

Isabelle, who celebrated her eighty-seventh
birthday over the weekend, has a wonderful sense of humor. She, her husband
Ralph, Al and I were sitting around a table in the dining room one evening. Al
was talking about the woman from the hospital who comes out a couple days a
week to put him through an exercise regimen.

“Now that I’ve done the exercises for a while,
I’m feeling a little better. I’m not getting dizzy like I was,” he said. “Of
course, I’m not drinking as much as I used to, and I’m not smoking as much.”

“You’re not smoking as much because you
can’t find any good grass,” Isabelle said.

“Well, that’s true,” Al said.

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